Is It Harder to Write Humorously Than It Is to Write Seriously?

In Bookends, two writers take on questions about the world of books. This week, James Parker and Rivka Galchen discuss the difficulty in writing funny.

By James Parker

For a certain kind of writer, seriousness is the default. It’s what you do when you haven’t got anything else going on.

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James ParkerCreditIllustration by R. Kikuo Johnson

Oh, much. Much! I can already tell, for instance, sitting here in early-morning Starbucks waiting for the coffee to hit, that this is not going to be a funny column. The language making its way into my forebrain is not humorous: It is lumpy, heavy-breathing, pre-caffeinated. No levity, no lift. My thoughts do not have wings. They are auk-like. (The great auk: the extinct flightless bird. See what I mean?) That slightly dank, cindery Starbucks smell — as if the fires of inspiration have just been quenched with buckets of iced water — is hanging funereally in my nostrils. This might even be a miniature literary tragedy, this column.

For a certain kind of writer, seriousness is the default. It’s what you do when you haven’t got anything else going on. More particularly, it’s what you do when you’re under pressure. This has been one of the most dismaying discoveries, for me, of a couple of decades in journalism: the direct relationship between mental fatigue, incoming deadlines and a kind of corrupted and humorless high style. As the cutoff point approaches and the nonessential prose systems shut down, I write — not more wildly or sloppily or out-there wittily, but more sententiously. My syntax bloats. My starved-of-resources brain reaches for ready-made language, ready-made thought. Clichés, in a word — but not of the good, hearty, idiomatic, lead-a-horse-to-water variety. What I grab at are the impressive-sounding banalities, the clichés that don’t yet know they’re clichés. Turn away, reader!

“I looked up because of the laughter, and kept looking because of the girls.” That — from “The Girls,” by Emma Cline, a novel I have seen many people reading on public transport — is a very good, serious first line. The widening of a moment, the deepening of a glance: the chin reflexively lifts, and then interest, desire, imagination are quickened. Sort of what you hope will happen when somebody starts to read your book. A beautiful line. But is it any more beautiful, in design or effect, than this, the first line of “The Stench of Honolulu,” by Jack Handey? “When my friend Don suggested we go on a trip to the South Seas together and offered to pay for the whole thing, I thought, Fine, but what’s in it for me?” (If I saw somebody reading “The Stench of Honolulu” on public transport I would embrace her like a sister.)

Humor is quantum: It is grace, it is poetry, it is the wild airborne yeast that activates the dough of reality. It is impossible to be humorous about, in the abstract, because it is anti-abstraction: It adores the particular. Who wrote “Great Eggspectations”? Charles Chickens. That joke — for some reason the only joke I can ever remember — contains truths too deep to pursue. If you’re going to write humorously, if you’re going to be funny on the page, you must first access the humor layer, and there are many mornings on which this is simply impossible. Then — once you’ve broken into the realm of dancing atoms and burglarized it for an idea — you have to do mysterious, instinctive things with rhythm and word order. (A not-often-considered element of good stand-up comedy, it seems to me, is an aptitude for prose.) And even then, you still don’t know. You might not be got. I’ve said this to many a patient apprentice writer: If you are embarking on a relationship with an editor and it becomes clear that said editor does not get your jokes — quit. Flee. Shake the dust from your feet, because it will never work between you.

In conclusion, the future belongs to stern, hectoring bozo-prose, with no giggles at all. Because it’s easier.

James Parker is a contributing editor at The Atlantic and has written for Slate, The Boston Globe and Arthur magazine. He was a staff writer at The Boston Phoenix and in 2008 won a Deems Taylor Award for music criticism from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers.

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By Rivka Galchen

Sarah Silverman has used the term ‘mouth full of blood’ laughs for the laughs you don’t want.

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Rivka GalchenCreditIllustration by R. Kikuo Johnson

The Bosnian-born American writer Aleksandar Hemon told the following story in a recent interview in Sarajevo:

“When I first came back to Sarajevo after the war in 1997, I stayed with a family; they were like family to me although they weren’t strictly speaking my family. They had all remained here, the 10 of them living together — three families in one apartment, in Marijin Dvor, directly in the sight line of the snipers that would shoot into the apartment. And the hunger . . . I don’t need to explain it to anyone here. There was nothing to eat. Every now and again, someone would go out in search of food. They’d find nothing or find something, some coffee, some cigarettes.

“And one time, someone came back with a potato — a wrinkled, wilted potato. What are the 10 of them going to do with a single potato? But then, since no one had seen a potato for God knows how long and since there hadn’t been any TV for God knows how long, they placed the potato on the middle of the table and they sat there and watched the potato. As they were telling me this . . . It was a horrible time . . . The husband of this woman, Jozefina, who was like my grandmother . . . Her husband had died of a stroke during the war. But as they were telling me this, they were laughing. Doubling over with laughter like it’s the funniest thing in the world — how they watched a potato during the war.”

I’m naturally inclined to see comic writing as not only more difficult, but also more ethical, more honest, more essential and even more serious than apparently serious writing, yet nothing can be so formally absolute. I consider Jaroslav Hasek’s comic picaresque “The Good Soldier Svejk” the most essential novel about World War I, Joseph Heller’s gag-filled “Catch-22” the most essential about World War II and Muriel Spark’s “The Girls of Slender Means” one of the best, and funniest, books about civilian life in the span of both of those (obviously) tragic, serious and extremely consequential wars.

Hemon has not always chosen a straightforwardly comic tone for his work, but his most recent novel, “The Making of Zombie Wars,” is very funny, attentive to the latent brutality in American pop culture, and is set during the start of the Iraq War. Hemon said he wanted “to translate fury into humor.”

Humorous writing is difficult in part because it seems to assure the reader that she can turn away at any time if the fool ceases to charm. In this way, humor is itself precarious — a fitting valence for so much of what is sad. If the potato anecdote were told with more or different detail, or less perfect timing — “and since no one had seen a potato for God knows how long and since there hadn’t been any TV for God knows how long” — the story would lose much of its power, even as its contents remained the same. Remove the description of the potato as “wrinkled, wilted” and the story is less funny. Serious writing doesn’t lose its power as easily through minor misstep; it commands us to listen anyway. That very quality of command makes it suspect.

But can there be a wrong kind of funny? Sarah Silverman has used the term “mouth full of blood” laughs for the laughs that you don’t want — for example, a joke meant to reveal racism as ridiculous that gets laughed at as a celebration of racism. Maybe this is what people mean when they say that comedy is too cruel. Maybe it’s just that it’s so difficult to get right.

And so to the ever-present Republican nominee for president. What kind of funny was he? What kind of funny is he? It seems that nearly everyone’s laughter, from all political corners, was too easy, and wrong. It was almost all mouth-full-of-blood laughs, when what we needed was something more seriously funny. More potatoes, maybe. And also more of the apparent love and fellow feeling for one another that was shown by the makeshift, potato-watching family in Sarajevo.

Rivka Galchen is a recipient of a William J. Saroyan International Prize for Fiction, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and a Berlin Prize, among other distinctions. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in numerous publications, including Harper’s and The New Yorker, which selected her for their list of “20 Under 40” American fiction writers in 2010. Her debut novel, the critically acclaimed “Atmospheric Disturbances,” was published in 2008, and her second book, a story collection titled “American Innovations,” in 2014. Her most recent book, “Little Labors,” was published in May.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page 31 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Is It Harder to Write Humorously Than It Is to Write Seriously?. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe